I just had a discussion with Owen about the state of F14+gnome-shell,
and wanted to give an update on why we decided not to try updating it
from the current state (last updated Jul 13), and concentrate on F15
instead.
So most of the development has been happening in git/jhbuild, and we
haven't even managed to get rawhide updated due to the XULRunner
changes (work on rawhide is proceeding now,
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=622896 for the curious).
Now, multiple things would need to occur for F14:
- Separate clutter 1.4 parallel install package
Impact on critical path: None. Sort of ugly is the only thing.
- Updated GTK3 package
Impact on critical path: Low/None (some things in F14 oddly
require gtk3 that shouldn't, like seed...needs investigation). But
we'd *also* have to look at either updating packages like
gnome-desktop3 (or removing them).
- gobject-introspection 0.9.5+
This implies simple rebuilds of a lot of packages for the
lookaside GIR/.typelib data, which is straightforward. However,
updating to this version also implies pulling in a new pygobject,
which has had quite a bit of code changes. Upstream feels confident,
but it's just one thing that weighs against an update (a possible
alternative path is to disable introspection from pygobject).
So the alternative here is:
- Add a warning/note to F14 gnome-shell that it's old and to:
- Make it easier and better to run F15/rawhide. Which involves
fixing the problems there, and scripting the rpm/yum foo better to
make the switch, and being a lot more aggressive about preventing
regressions.

Since there is so much that's going to be new in Fedora 15 compared to
Fedora 14 (GNOME 3, GTK+-3, systemd, NetworkManager-0.9, and so on), the
Red Hat desktop team wanted to get an early start on running the new
stuff even before Fedora 14 is out.
So, I spent a few hours last night and this morning upgrading my primary
laptop from Fedora 13 to Rawhide. Generally worked better than I might
have expected... without too much work I got to a system that seems
basically usable.
One big caveat is that the result of a F14 => rawhide upgrade is a messy
hybrid -
$ rpm -qa | grep fc14 | wc -l
631
$ rpm -qa | grep fc15 | wc -l
701
It's not nearly a pure F15 system yet.
So, I thought I should dump out notes of the procedure I used and a few
snags I hit to help anybody else on the same path.
Upgrade procedure
=================
Step 1: Used preupgrade to upgrade from f13 to f14
Worked apparently perfectly, very slick experience
(Only real wart was that for encrypted root Anaconda has a
"Enter passphrase to decrypt" [ ] This is a global passphrase"
dialog, and the "global passphrase" thing is pretty hard to
understand. "Use this passphrase for all partitions" ? Or just
try it on the other partitions and ask me then if it
didn't work?)
Step 2: Installed fedora-release-rawhide, disabled f14, enabled rawhide
Step 3: Switched to a VT and ran 'yum update --skip-broken'
(I actually first tried 'telinit 3' and that didn't work right - the
GNOME session was left up, VT's were gone, and the system hung when
I then tried to reboot. Wonder if something got broken with the
upstart => systemd => upstart adventure>)
I had to remove a handful of various packages to get this to work,
but I think they were all local builds or stuff I installed from 3rd
party repositories.
Step 4: reboot
Things were mostly working at this point,
Fixing the result
=================
* I was left without a link from /usr/bin/emacs-<version>
to /usr/bin/emacs, so I had to create that manually.
* gtk3-engines didn't get installed on the upgrade, so I had
to install that manually.
* The GTK+ 3 module for ibus seems to be more or less broken.
I had to remove ibus to get gtk3 applications to run without
crashing. (Setting /desktop/gnome/interface/gtk-im-module
to gtk-im-context-simple might have work, but didn't
immediately seem to for some reason, and I needed to get to
a less crashy state.)
* Accessibility modules were producing a ton of bad looking spew
and dconf-editor had a gail/treeview related crash. I couldn't
figure out if there is a way of turning off accessibility
entirely through the new control center, so I turned off
/desktop/gnome/interface/accessibility. Strangely I had to
log out and log in before GTK+ apps stopped loading the
accessibility modules. g-s-d bug?
* All outgoing ssh was hanging - turned out that gnome-keyring-prompt
was hanging weirdly inside g_once_enter_init(); when I finally
saw stderr, it was obviously a need for a rebuild because of
struct size changes in gtk3. So, fired off a rebuild of
gnome-keyring in koji.
Also noted:
'killall gnome-settings-daemon' kills nm-applet, and leaves it in a
state where it doesn't recover even after restarting g-s-d, until
you log out and log back in. Weird.

Hi,
we, at the design team, are searching for a way to add attribution to
wallpapers. We'd like to display it in the tooltip that appears in when
you hoover over an wallpaper in backgrounds chooser in a similar format
that KDE does it, e.g.
<b><wallpaper name></b>
Author: <author name>
<basic image info>
Folder: <path to where the image is>
As you see, it only adds the 'Author:' line to what already is there. Is
there some way to do it currently, or would we need to write a patch to
background chooser?
Plus, is there any place where I can get the DTD file that's used as
DOCTYPE in all XMLs in /usr/share/gnome-background-properties:
<!DOCTYPE wallpapers SYSTEM "gnome-wp-list.dtd">
I cannot find it anywhere (hence the reason why I ask if there already
IS a way)...
Thanks,
Martin

Hey, everyone. So, it's time for pre-release testing again!
I know this didn't work perfectly for Alpha, but I've got together with
releng and tightened up processes and it should be better for Beta. So:
right now, here:
http://serverbeach1.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/14-Beta.RC2/Live/
you will find live images for all of the desktop spins (KDE, XFCE, LXDE,
Desktop) for RC2 of Fedora 14 Beta. I have tested them, and all four at
least boot in a VM, so they're not completely broken like some of the
Alpha images :) I also tested KDE and Desktop on bare metal, and I think
Christoph has LXDE booted on bare metal right now, so we're pretty sure
these are working at a basic level. You won't be wasting a download :)
So with these spins we need to fill out these tables:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Current_Desktop_Test
As you can see, I've made a start on this already, but there's many
tests to fill out. We absolutely need to fill out all the Alpha and Beta
tests for each spin. It would be great to also do the Final tests, as
this gives us a head start on identifying and fixing blocker issues for
the final release.
If people could do some of these tests over the next few days (by
Wednesday) that would be awesome. Also note that I'm running a session
at FUDCon Zurich this afternoon where we'll hopefully be able to get
together and fill out some of the table, so if you're at FUDCon, come
out to my session at 2pm :)
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net

Hello everybody. _o/ (I'm new here)
I have somes questions about Fedora:
- Why Avahi service are activate but port not open?
- Why SSH service are activate and port open? (I think is a security
problem)
- Why telepathy-sofiasip package is no installed by default ? (Because
it work)
- Why are there, in Gnome Desktop, 3 redundant and not useful icons?
(Computer, User's Home and Trash)
For the last question, the problem is that these three place are already
accessible from the two Gnome Panels. 'Computer' and 'User's home' are
accessible from 'Places' menu of Gnome menu and 'Trash' from the Trash
icon in bottom right.
Thanks for all answers and good day. (^_^)

Hi, everyone. Fedora 14 Beta RC3 images - that's the third (and
hopefully final) release candidate for F14 Beta - are now available for
testing here:
http://serverbeach1.fedoraproject.org/pub/alt/stage/14-Beta.RC3/
aside from anaconda fixes, the backgrounds are now present in LXDE and
XFCE, and LXDE initializes ConsoleKit correctly, fixing several major
issues. I've tested that each of these boots to a desktop successfully,
so they're not DOA, you won't be wasting your time to download them.
Please, if you have some time, help fill out the test matrix here:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Test_Results:Fedora_14_Beta_RC3_Desktop
just click on a test name, follow the steps, and enter your result in
the table (there's a key explaining how to put the results in the
table). Even if someone else has done a test, you can add your result:
the table will handle this and we can have more confidence with many
results than with one. Even if you can only do one or two tests, it's
useful! We have to have the table filled out (at least with the Alpha
and Beta tests) to go ahead and release the Beta. The go/no-go meeting
is on Wednesday afternoon US time, so results need to be in by then for
the Beta. Thanks a lot, everyone!
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net